A. Lange & Söhne is revisiting the Datograph Perpetual, the first model to put a perpetual calendar into the Datograph chronograph. That combination was already a flex when it launched in platinum in 2006 – pairing a column-wheel flyback chronograph with a full perpetual calendar isn’t something many manufacturers attempt even now. 20 years on, the new Datograph Perpetual (ref. 410.136E) returns in the same metal as the original, but Lange has found a way to make it even more special, swapping the usual hour markers for 11 baguette-cut diamonds, a combination the manufacture hasn’t tried on this reference before. Just 50 will be made and given how quickly these limited runs tend to go, we fully expect this one to sell out just as fast.
The case stays at a wearable 41mm (13.5mm thick), but going back to platinum after runs in gold (with the Honey Gold Lumen edition) and steel brings back the cool, weighty feel of the 2006 original, now carried through on a five-row bracelet with a quick-release deployant buckle.
The dial is where this one really makes its case, though. Lange has hand-applied eleven baguette-cut diamonds as hour markers, including a pair at 12 o’clock. They’re near-colourless (F–G grade) and essentially flawless to the eye (VVS clarity), around 0.13 carats in total. The markers at 4 and 8 o’clock have been dropped altogether to make room for the subdials, which sit in rhodié against the black dial and have been moved down slightly as a result.
Against the platinum, the diamonds actually read fairly understated – it’s the blued and red accents on the hands and subdials that catch your eye first. That restraint feels right. The watch is already doing enough, and the diamonds keep the Datograph Perpetual a complication watch first rather than tipping it into jewellery-watch territory.
The layout still follows Lange’s usual triangle: the signature oversized date at 12 o’clock marks the top point, small seconds, day of week and day/night at 9 o’clock and the month and leap-year display and chronograph minute counter at 3 o’clock form the base, and the moon-phase at 6 o’clock closes it off. Hour and minute hands, plus the day-of-week, month and leap-year hands, are in 750 gold and the chronograph minute counter and subsidiary seconds hand are blued steel, with the chronograph seconds hand in rhodiumed steel.
For plenty of Datograph fans, though, the dial was never really the point. When the original calibre L951 came out in 1999, its level of finishing was enough to catch much of Swiss haute horlogerie off guard, and it’s often credited with pushing finishing standards forward across the industry through the early 2000s.
This platinum edition uses the same manual-wind L952.1 that has powered the Datograph Perpetual since 2006, and the movement still lives up to that reputation. It’s made in Glashütte, finished by hand and assembled twice, with 556 parts – 223 of them in the calendar mechanism alone. Flip the watch over and the sapphire caseback shows why collectors rate the finishing so highly: a column-wheel chronograph with its rockers and levers laid out and lengthened to reach the lowered subdials, set against German silver plates and bridges, four screwed gold chatons and a hand-engraved balance cock.
Functionally, it’s a flyback chronograph with a precisely jumping minute counter, and it measures to a fifth of a second. The perpetual calendar won’t need correcting until 1 March 2100, when it has to be put forward by one day, and Lange says the moon phase drifts by just one day every 122.6 years if the watch is kept running. All the calendar displays and the moon phase advance together from a single pusher at 10 o’clock, which has a safety mechanism to stop it being pressed by accident.
Twenty years is a reasonable point to revisit a watch like this, and platinum plus diamonds is a logical way to mark it without touching the underlying mechanics Lange got right the first time. Whether the jewelled dial reads as a fitting tribute or as decoration the watch didn’t need will likely split opinion among Datograph purists.
Price and Specs:
More details at A. Lange & Söhne.
